What Alfred Sant has certainly given the Labour Party is belief in itself. He has hammered and chiselled, sometimes against all odds and using sub-standard tools, at what seemed to be an innate sense of inferiority among the party faithful, who had traditionally thought their party could not in any way match the other big party on the island. Not in number or innovation, both of which have traditionally been in the MLP’s realm almost since its inception, but in the way things are carried out, in the overall perception of things political in Malta and Gozo and the almost awe-struck attitude adopted to anything said or written by the opposite camp.
While there are still Labourites who think that the Nationalist Party machine is flawless, as it depends on a knapsack of power-holders in contrast to Labour’s overwhelmingly democratic internal system, events that have occurred over the past few years have revealed that no political party, however old or strong, can avoid its periodic schisms, particularly at a time when it loses direction and finds itself in the midst of inevitable decadence.
This long-disproved idea that the Nationalists “always” seem to find a way through such crises is often associated with the fact that it is, as it has always been, run mostly by a closely-knit pocket of lawyers who, as we know their profession demands, excel in all the wheeling and dealing of power politics. It is also the fruit of a huge media weapon that is wielded by the powerful for the benefit of the powerful, which is why over the decades we have seen anti-MLP stories of disgruntled individuals and some yesterday men being blown out of all proportion on the front-pages of newspapers that seemingly had nothing else to splash, while similar stories connected with the Nationalist Party are either relegated to obscure inside pages or even overlooked.
It is this same mentality of submission that has, in the past, made Labourites feel uncomfortable even when in a superior electoral or propaganda position, and which Dr Sant has correctly targeted over the years he has been leading what is today back to being the biggest party on the island.
It has been no easy task. When you have been brought up to think that they “work better”, that they have “bottomless financial resources”, that they have “the Church, the Law Courts and the media on their side” and that they “always tend to come up with a trump card come the election”, you are entitled to feel inferior and pessimistic.
Then you have to consider the other odd-ball perceptions that emanate from and are associated with attendance at State rather than private schools, the use of the National language as opposed to a bizarre, often laughable kind of English, family connections, traditional social dependencies and big-money status-uppers.
When one is made to feel inferior, one is bound to be reactive rather than proactive, a condition that has consistently irked the Socialist thinkers of all time. From a local perspective, Dom Mintoff first helped turn it into a militancy that was probably the ideal weapon in the tough days of post-World War II social struggles.
What Dr Sant has done, again, is gradually switch his party from a militant, uncompromising movement into a resourceful and creative political machine that can, after all, match any other at a moment in time when politics everywhere in the 21st century world have taken on a new hue. Suddenly, political defections are no longer the prerogative of the Left. People on the Right and the Centre-Right have discovered there really is sense in the cycle and transition of political realities, and from what we have been incredulously assisting to on the local front, they are ready to part with tradition and time-honoured, even emotional, attachments to help bring a much-needed change in the governance of these islands.
Political defections are the result of certain psychological conditions. There are those that occur on principle, more or less genuine, and which take the form of instantaneous conversions in the Paul-of-Tarsus mould. There are also defections that are sometimes a matter of personal convenience, the roots of which are dissatisfaction and retaliation.
The other defections are those of people who simply cannot accept the exaggerated accumulation of power and corruption, of downright arrogance and sheer greed. Theirs is not a switch in political colour, and they would hasten to emphasise this point, but more of a switch in thinking at awkward times when politicians in power seem helplessly caught in a vicious circle and only by being jolted out of it could there be hope in the future. It is a kind of you-have-to-be-cruel-to-be-kind way of telling a party it has had its glory and its fun, now is the time to move over and let the powers of political nature do their business. Change not simply for the sake of change, but change for rejuvenation, change for new ideas, change for new methods and styles, change for the better and the chance to start afresh. Wherever and from who ever it may come from.
As we now throw ourselves into the old electoral groove (this will be my eighth in the media), it is this actual state of political affairs that will set the boundaries, not slogans or revamped ideas that once belonged to another time, another day. The defectors, both those that have gone public and the others that prefer to express it on polling day, are already pointing the way forward – change.